ASPI reports shows right-wing extremists are expanding their funding drive

A study from the Australian Strategic Policy Institute also found Australian right-wing groups were increasingly intertwined with their overseas equivalents online.

Right-wing extremists were a growing concern to Australian intelligence agencies, and their activity has spiked during the Covid-19 pandemic.

Report author Ariel Bogle said they were shifting away from an "old school model", revolving around in-person meetings, to new methods for funding online.

"Often the way I saw funding requests being framed was like [they were] influencers, as you might see people asking for support as a wellness influencer," she said.

"It was a model of patronage where figures are rewarded for the entertainment value of their content, and their perceived commitment to the far-right cause."

READ MORE COVID-19 NEWS:

Australian far-right extremists used 22 funding methods between January and July, including cryptocurrency, GoFundMe pages, PayPal, live streaming services, and even merchandise sales.

Links to far-right content were circulated via encrypted messaging app Telegram, which acted as a "central guide and point of communication" for extremists, the report found.

The funding model mirrored those seen across among far-right groups in the UK and the US.

And Ms Bogle warned the borderless internet meant far-right groups were increasingly linked across borders, with Australian figures appearing on international extremists podcasts and livestreams.

"We're seeing all these Australian funding requests promoted into international accounts, some of which have hundreds or thousands of subscribers," she said.

"It also helps to solidify the Australian far-right's connections with overseas far-right.

"Certainly the funding mechanisms we're seeing in Australia have been used, and even pioneered, by far-right figures in the United States."

Although most funding platforms explicitly banned hate speech, their policies "often unclear and not uniformly enforced", the report found.

"These forms of far-right micro financing exploit a gap between financial regulation and the platform's Terms of Service, which often ban hate speech," Ms Bogle said.

ASPI has called for more clarity on whether platforms were legally required to proactively root-out funding for extremists.

YouTube has begun demonetising channels which repeatedly violated its hate-speech guidelines, but Ms Bogle conceded enforcing speech guidelines raised a number of civil liberties concerns.

"Enforcement can go both ways. You need accountability and transparency when they correctly remove material, but also when they incorrectly do," she said.

"There is a risk here that innocent people get caught up in these kinds of takedowns."

A fundraising drive linked to neo-Nazi leader Thomas Sewell on the Buy Me a Coffee also showed the limitations of simply removing content.

Multiple links to the site, notionally to fund Sewell's legal fees, were circulated on Telegram.

"Those fundraising pages were repeatedly removed by the company, but the channel posted back quite a few different ones," Ms Bogle said.

A message on the Telegram channel insisted "it doesn't do anything to the money" when the post was removed, though it was unclear whether Sewell gained access to the funds.

ASIO chief Mike Burgess in April revealed far-right groups now accounted for 40 per cent of the organisation's workload, up from 16 per cent in just three years.

The threat was laid bare in 2019 when an Australian terrorist, radicalised partly via right-wing chat rooms, murdered 51 Muslim worshippers in Christchurch, NZ.

While his attack was apparently self-funded, he made numerous online donations to right-wing groups.

Our journalists work hard to provide local, up-to-date news to the community. This is how you can continue to access our trusted content: